Uber drivers will verify their identities through selfies

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From now on, Uber drivers will start their shifts with selfies. 

The ride-hailing company is expanding its Real-Time ID Check feature across the US, it announced in a blog post Friday. Drivers submit a selfie through the app to ensure the person driving the car matches Uber’s account on file. 

The feature doesn’t connect to a background check or do anything else to ensure the underlying safety of Uber drivers. Instead, it just checks that the person in the car is the same one Uber has on file. 

Drivers will be asked periodically to submit selfies before accepting rides, Uber said. The company uses Microsoft’s Cognitive Services API to compare the photo to one it has. If the photos don’t match, a driver’s account will be temporarily blocked.  Read more…

More about Microsoft, Uber Drivers, Selfies, Uber, and Business


Cloud Computing

Microsoft, Google make their pitches to unseat Amazon in the cloud

The past two weeks have been a bonanza of cloud conferences and they provide useful insight into the ongoing IaaS cloud wars between Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Google makes its case in the cloud

Last week Google attempted to attract developers to its cloud with the inaugural GCP NEXT Conference in San Francisco.

+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 10 Biggest announcements from Google’s cloud conference | Hottest products at Hadoop World conference +

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Network World Cloud Computing

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Pep Boys shows how their marketing cloud scored triple-digit ROI (webinar)

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VB WEBINAR:

Imagine every piece of data about a customer, or a potential customer, at your fingertips. Find out why top marketers say that investing in a marketing cloud solution can help you unlock the full promise of data-driven marketing. 

Register here for free.

Rachel Silva, AVP of marketing at the multi-billion dollar auto parts and service chain PepBoys, has been implementing marketing cloud solutions for her company since the day she walked in the door.

And the foundation of any marketing cloud strategy, she says, is finding the right vendor. Even if you think you’ve found your match,  be open to other solutions out there,” she says. “Because at the end of the day, while our relationships are really important to us, we want to make sure we’re using the best solution — and prove out the great solutions we have in place as well.”

Silva and her team have been working with MediaMath since the start. “We’ve always seen positive results,” she says, “and we continue to see an improvement in results year after year.” But, she warns, it’s important to never get too comfortable. “I’m always testing,” she says. “Test, optimize, and then expand.”

MediaMath’s cloud marketing solution, Helix, has become the backbone of Pep Boys’ retargeting and prospecting strategies, helping the  marketing team maximize their spend. Cookie pools are huge, she notes, but you can’t remarket to everybody. How do you best leverage your dollar? “Retailers don’t have CPT budgets,” she adds, “so we need to be as cost effective as possible and we also need to drive sales.”

The marketing cloud is the solution for businesses without the budgets required to carry out a large-scale awareness campaign. It completely replaces that traditional, more scattershot marketing approach with something far more targeted because of the tremendous amount of data available.

To attract new customers and increase online sales, Silva leverages pooled real-time transactional and browsing data from MediaMath to build a picture not only of the existing PepBoy audience, but their potential customers. Lookalike modeling based on cloud data efficiently and cost-effectively targets new prospects.

“We saw our prices decrease and our returns increase,” Silva says. According to Silva, Pep Boys’ cloud-driven prospecting models had a 52 percent lower CPA, and an extraordinary 365 percent increase in ROAS over a two-year period.

“With the expansion of cloud marketing, there’s a lot more data that can be looked at,” she says. “Layer in data whenever and wherever you can, because it’s just going to make results better.”

But how do you determine the best way to get that data? While Silva and Yeoman Technologies CEO Michael Healey will be sharing insights from the front lines, VB Director of Marketing Technology Stewart Roger will be sharing essential take-aways from our recent report: “Marketing Clouds: How the best companies are winning via marketing technology.” Rogers will share how many of the top vendors scored on a number of features and who’s really killing it today.

Don’t miss out!

Register now for free.

After this webinar, you’ll know:

  • What makes up a marketing cloud and why it may be right for your organization
  • The five different types of marketing cloud
  • VentureBeat’s best marketing cloud software bets for SMBs, enterprises, and startups
  • The ROI marketers can expect from their implementation
  • How to encourage and improve user adoption

Speakers:

  • Stewart Rogers, , VentureBeat
  • Michael Healey, CEO, Yeoman Technologies
  • Rachel Silva, Assistant VP, Marketing, Pep Boys

Moderator:

  • Wendy Schuchart, Analyst, VentureBeat



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Facebook Mentions now lets journalists monitor what’s being said about their stories

Screenshot of Facebook Mentions

article_in_phone4Facebook is expanding the capabilities of its Mentions app to now let journalists keep track of what people are saying about their articles — even if they’re not mentioned by name. To accomplish this, media professionals need to implement an author tag on their website that connects to their Facebook profile or page.

Available only to verified profiles, celebrities, and journalists, Facebook Mentions is the social networking company’s way to let these highly engaged and followed individuals better communicate with their fans. As journalists are churning out stories, being able to find out what people are saying about a particular breaking news-type story or feature that they wrote can be rewarding.

So for example, while internal metrics may show that my feature on Y Combinator had a large number of shares, that’s all it is: a number. If I want to examine the sentiment behind it, Facebook Mentions might be an opportune thing for me to look at. There are people who are sharing it without finding a need to tag me in their post — and why should they?

For publishers interested in trying this out, Facebook says an additional line of code in the header section of their webpage is needed. This will associate the author with their Facebook profile or page so the system will know when the journalist’s byline appears on the social network. Other capabilities are being planned to help enhance this feedback tracking capability within Mentions.

Facebook Mentions launched in July 2014.

More information:

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